Clearly, His Game's In Shape

July 02, 1993|By Robert Markus.

Keith Clearwater had reason to celebrate Thursday after firing a 5-under-par 67 in the opening round of the Western Open. Did he uncork a bottle of champagne? Order a big steak and french fries? Go out dancing? Or romancing?

None of the above. He pumped iron, just as he's done most nights for the last couple of years. He knew he'd be sore in the morning, but "I've done it enough to know I can still play good golf.

"At first you have to force yourself to go work out and prove to yourself that, `Hey, I just shot 68 after pounding myself in the gym.' Otherwise you'll always find some excuse or other and you'll never do it."

Clearwater has been the pro golf tour's most dedicated muscle builder ever since he tore up his right shoulder in a freak accident 2 1/2 years ago and put it back together with the help of a weight-training program.

Has it helped his golf game? He doesn't know, but he said "it's something I do not for golf, but for life." Judging from Thursday's results, it hasn't hurt his golf game any. Clearwater's 67 resulted from six birdies and just one bogey on a course he admitted was playing "fairly easy."

"I didn't play all that well," he said, "but I putted extremely well. I kept the ball in play and didn't make stupid decisions."

Clearwater leaped onto center stage as a PGA Tour rookie back in 1987 when he scored two victories and shot a record-tying 64 in the third round of the U.S. Open.

He hasn't won a tournament since but insists he's playing better golf. "I didn't play all that great my rookie year," he said. "I actually played better the year before when I won seven tournaments on the TPS (Tournament Player Series) tour. To win $150,000 on the mini-tours back in 1986, you had to go some.

"My rookie year appears to be wonderful because I won twice, but I only had four top 10 finishes that year. That's not that good."

Things would get worse before they got better, however, and the low point had to be when Clearwater fell down a basement window well while building a fence outside his home.

"I was telling somebody what to do, being real important, and I turned around and fell seven feet into that hole." His arm went in one direction, his shoulder in the other, causing both a fracture and dislocation.

That was the bad news. The good news was that his next-door neighbor, his brother-in-law, is a physical therapist. "You're not even supposed to start therapy for nine weeks," he said, "and I was back playing golf in seven."

The first thing his brother-in-law did was to put his arm back in place, "the most painful thing you can imagine. Two guys put their feet up against you and pull your arm out and then put it back."

Within a day he was doing range of motion therapy. When he resumed playing "it hurt in both directions," he conceded, "but golf is a game you can play with a lot of injuries and still play great."

He hasn't always played great, but his workout routine has helped him keep his life in perspective.

"In golf," he reasoned, "you can put in a lot of effort and leave on Friday night, having lost money and thinking you've regressed. You can work really hard for three weeks straight and miss every cut. It's nice to do something where you can see progress and at the end of the week you can say, `I've made gains in an area.' ".

Clearwater, who can bench-press 250 pounds and has a goal of 300, has a home gym in his basement and on tour finds a health club in the area to do his workouts. "The only way a muscle is going to grow," he said, "is by pushing it beyond what it's ever done before. It requires killing yourself.

"Picking up a dumbbell 15 times and putting it down when you know you could do 30 more doesn't do a thing for you."

Whether his hobby has done anything for his golf game is still uncertain, but last year, although winless, he earned a career-high $609,273. So far this year, he has collected $267,985 and, if he can play three more rounds like Thursday's, will add considerably to that total this weekend.

Winless or not, "I played good golf last year. There's not some magical thing called winning. Winning is a host of things, getting into position, having good fortune, timing. People with wisdom say that, eventually, winning takes place if you're in contention enough times."